2016 Breakthrough Prize for Neutrino Research

Members of the Lancaster University Neutrino Physics group have been awarded a share of the prestigious 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. This year's prize is awarded to the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) collaboration and to the T2K/K2K collaboration, both of which have had long-term Lancaster involvement, as well as to the Super-Kamiokande, Daya Bay and KamLAND collaborations.

The prize, presented by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, was awarded "for the fundamental discovery of neutrino oscillations, revealing a new frontier beyond, and possibly far beyond, the standard model of particle physics". The prize is valued at 3 million USD, shared equally between the five experiments.

The SNO experiment, who's director Art McDonald was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize, demonstrated conclusively that the most elusive, known particle in the universe, neutrinos, change from one type to another as they travel from the sun to Earth. The T2K experiment was the first to observe explicitly the appearance of one type of neutrino in a beam of a different type. This discovery sets the stage for the study of differences in the neutrino oscillation process relative to their antiparticles (antineutrinos), called CP violation, that may elucidate how the universe came to be matter-dominated. T2K has recently started data-taking with an antineutrino beam to study antineutrino oscillations.